Elvis Shops at K-Mart!

Dan'l Broome did not get much done the day he found Vicki Starr sleeping in the pallet yard next to his shop. First there was getting acquainted and picking out splinters. Then there was finding something for her to wear. Then there was dealing with the fact that she wouldn't tell him where she lived.

"I don't remember," she said, her violet eyes large and innocent. "I don't know how I got here either or what happened to my clothes." She smiled up at him. "Must have been some party, huh?"

He sighed. She looked so cute with one of his painting smocks wrapped around her and tied with a leather tension strap. Cute? Face it, she looked as sexy as a whole squad of the Swedish Bikini Team, he told himself.

"Do you want to go to the emergency room?" he asked.

"Oh, no," she said, looking a bit alarmed. "I feel fine, I just don't remember things."

"Maybe you had a head injury," he suggested.

She put her hands on her head and felt of it. She seemed to wince at one point but denied that she had any bruises. "I'm fine, really," she said, breathing in and out in a way that made him forget all about guitars.

After a few moments of just watching her breathe he stammered, "Well, we should get you some other clothes. That smock makes you look like some sort of conceptual art project."

She laughed at that.

"Oh my, God," he said aloud. "You've got dimples."

"I do?" she said, putting the tips of her elegant fingers unerringly into them.

Dan'l couldn't stop grinning. "I was saying," he tried to continue, "you need something to wear that fits better than my old painting smock."

Vicki glanced down. "It's colorful, though, isn't it?"

"Colorful, yeah, but not really appropriate. There's a K-Mart a couple of miles away, we could get you something there."

"I- I don't have any money," she said.

"I'll buy you a few things," Dan'l promised. "You can pay me back when you remember where you live."

"Uh...."

"You want to tell me your sizes and I'll just go buy something or do you want to go with?" asked Dan'l.

"Uh...?"

# # #

"What are they doing?" asked Twirt.

"I think it's some kind of mating ritual," said Gooma.

"You're fudding me?" said Twirt. "These sloobs are mammals, right?"

Gooma occulated the reduced but still substantial ventral appendages of Star Bunny and said, "Oh, yeah."

"So which one ovulates in the other's marzipan?"

"Earther mammals don't do it that way," said Gooma.

"ALERT! ALERT! ALERT!" said the jumpship's ASS. "I'VE BEEN SCANNED BY PERSKOTONIC BEAM! THE OFFICER OF THE STELLAR CONSTABULARY IS STILL LOOKING FOR THIS JUMPSHIP!"

"Scare me out of seven cyclos of moult," grumbled Twirt after detaching four suckers from a bulkhead.

Gooma occulated a few dials and palpated some knobs. "You're using passive sensors only, right, ASS?"

"CORRECT!" said the ASS. "LOCALS CAN DETECT NON-SKOTONIC ENERGIES AND HAVE DEMONSTRATED ANTIPATHY TO OUR PRESENCE. AND THE CONSTABULARY JUMPSHIP IS LISTENING ON SKOTONIC BANDS, MOST ASSUREDLY."

"He gonna find us?" asked Twirt, waving a few random pseudo-pedipalps in excitement.

"Don't think so," said Gooma. "We've got a good hiding place and he doesn't want the locals to detect his jumpship either."

"Back to our groobulation?"

"Indubitably," said Gooma.

"Driz me again like you did last estival," said Twirt.

# # #

He's not going to keep believing me if I tell him I don't know my sizes, I shouldn't have told him a name, thought Vicki. Does amnesia even work that way? She glanced nervously at the guitar man who was still smiling at her. "I guess I'd better go with you," she said. "I'm kinda hard to fit."

He laughed.

Why is he laughing? she wondered.

"I can imagine," he said.

Imagine what? she thought. "Oh, you," she said.

Dan'l Broome just kept beaming at her.

She tried a few things as they made their way out the back of the shop area and he opened the passenger door on his battered old pick-up truck. She smiled. Tilted her head. Widened her eyes. Put a shoulder back then forward. Everything she did seemed to fascinate him. It's like magic, she thought. Or maybe it's another super-power.

"The door on the passenger side doesn't open from the inside," said Dan'l. "The handle is broken off," he said as he closed the door after offering her a hand and helping her into the seat.

"Oh," she said. "I guess I'll be trapped inside with you."

He seemed to think that was funny and was still laughing as he made his way around the front of the truck and got in on the driver's side.

I wonder why I even said that, she thought.

She found that she could keep Dan'l talking with only an occasional noise like, "Mm-hm." Or "Yeah." Or "So?"

They arrived at K-Mart and parked. Dan'l sat there, his keys in his hand, smiling across at her. She fidgeted a bit. Looked at him. Looked down at her chest. Looked back at him and he was looking at her chest. Oh, boy, she thought.

As soon as she tried to open the door, fumbling at the missing handle, Dan'l seemed to shake off his paralysis saying, "I'll have to open that from outside." He got out and dashed around the front of the truck again to open the passenger door from the outside.

About that time, Vicki's sense of humor kicked in. When Dan'l opened the door, she started giggling and couldn't stop. It didn't take long for her contagious hilarity to infect Dan'l and they both ended up leaning against the truck, laughing.

"What..." Dan'l gasped. "What's -- what's so funny?"

Vicki shrugged. "I dunno?" she said.

They laughed some more.

Finally, still chuckling, Dan'l managed to get hold of himself enough to ask Vickie if she wanted to go on into the store.

"I guess so," said Vickie, still giggling. What the heck was that about? she wondered.

Inside the store, Vickie became aware of almost everyone looking at her. The smock did not do her figure justice but the colorful stains plus her long nearly white blonde hair did attract attention, she supposed. Almost everyone smiled at her, too; especially, she noted, the men.

As they found the aisle with the underwear, a little girl ran up to her. "Are you a star?" she asked, obviously excited.

Vickie nodded. "Mm-hmm, I'm Vicki Starr."

The little girl turned and ran back to her mother, an obviously pregnant woman with a three-year-old boy clinging to her leg. "She's Vicki Starr!" shouted the little girl."I knew it, I knew it!" The mother waved shyly and the little boy started whooping and hollering with his big sister.

The excitement seemed to spread.

One of the women in the store uniform rushed up to Vicki and enthused, "I just love your show!"

Another elbowed her aside, "I knew it was you! You really do shop at K-Mart like on the commercials!"

"That's why you wouldn't tell me where you lived," said Dan'l. "When I didn't recognize your name, but I never watch TV!" He started laughing again.

Vicki looked around in amazement. How could all these people know her? Were they all cuckoo? She didn't have a TV show, did she?

The aisles closest to she and Dan'l filled with people staring and smiling. Someone started clapping and pretty soon everyone was, a standing ovation. Feeling a bit dizzy, Vicki tried taking a little bow but that only added whistles and foot stomps to the noise.

"Holy shit!" said Vicki. "Elvis has left the building!" She turned to Dan'l. "Get me out of here!"

But he had a goofy dazed look on his face, too.

Vicki grabbed his arm and tried dragging him toward the door. At first the crowd parted for her but then they began to edge closer. Thank God we didn't go to Wal-Mart, she thought, there'd be five times as many people!

"Get out of my way!" she screamed at one fat man blocking the path to the doors. Don't panic, she told herself, but panic looked more and more like the only reasonable reaction.

Suddenly galvanized into action, Dan'l stepped up and nailed the fat man in the forehead with an open hand blow, causing the poor fellow to sit down -- which did not remove him as a road block.

"Oh, my God," muttered Vicki. "I'm doing this somehow, I must be. How do I stop it?"

The crowd, eyes glassy, mouths open and babbling, circled closer. Dazed, Dan'l had lapsed back into staring at her.

# # #

Neener Neener, local officer of the Stellar Constabulary in Sector 2814, felt frustrated. The joyjumping bogtasses that he had come to Planet Dirt to remove from the interdicted zone were still hiding from him, successfully.

"Who expected slacktastic vacuum-noodles to be such clever wogstaffers?" he asked himself. With all his pursuit jumpship instruments, he could barely rell the remnants of their last use of dark energy somewhere on the Dirty surface. Unless they had a perskotonic drive that remained only theoretical in the rest of the Stellar Collation, they hadn't left the vicinity.

He could remain in Dirty Space only till the end of his shift, he wanted to get home in time for the opening ceremonies of the current Jumpball Octard, his favorite team, the Jerobim, would be playing their traditional rivals, the Kavylry in the opening jumpoff. He couldn't miss that just because some immature bogtasses were playing Chitin-and-Moult with him.

He consulted his ASS and determined that a dark energy pulse, a skotonergic boloid, could be crafted to reactivate dormant dark engines and force the blue stuffers to reveal themselves.

Thinking about blue stuff made him want a kick himself. He took a tiny bolus of confiscated contraband co-terpene from under his carapace and injected it directly into his premedullar rhombogata. "Ah," he siphonated. "That's good blue stuff."

After a few poctoments, he got back to work. "Initialize skotonergism," he instructed his ASS.

"INITIALIZED," replied the Artificially Sentient Sapience. "BOLOID READY FOR RELEASE IN THREE EIGHTHS EIGHTHS OF CURRENT OCTICYCLO."

"Drop a load, ASS," said Constable Neener.